


in my time of dying

by arochill



Series: Begin Again (Dream SMP) [5]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Sad Sam | Awesamdude, Sam | Awesamdude-Centric, Self-Blame, Self-Destruction, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29816952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arochill/pseuds/arochill
Summary: He should have known better. If there was one thing Sam understood, it was that. He shouldn’t have left Tommy alone – especially not with Dream. Never with Dream.This was his fault.
Series: Begin Again (Dream SMP) [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2195076
Comments: 12
Kudos: 78





	in my time of dying

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from led zeppelin’s “in my time of dying” :)
> 
> heed the warnings! and enjoy <3

It was laughably easy to accept Tommy’s death as his fault. He was the one who let Tommy back into the prison, he was the one who told the teen that getting closure for the past would be good for him. He was the one who thought that Dream, as insane as the man had become, wouldn’t  _ hurt  _ Tommy.

It was stupid, and idiotic, and he should have broken his own rules and pulled Tommy out of that cell the  _ moment  _ he was able. They were  _ his  _ rules. He was the Warden. He was in charge.

Tommy was a child. No matter how much the teen said otherwise, Tommy was still a  _ child. _

Tommy wouldn’t even reach his seventeenth birthday.

Tommy was sixteen. He would remain sixteen. Somehow, that was one of the worst things about it all.

He died before he hit seventeen, at the hands of a man who had already killed the teen twice before. Sam was an idiot. He was smart, he knew that. He should have known that it would always end up this way.

And that – Tommy’s death. Tommy’s death was  _ on him.  _ It was Sam’s fault, and that was all there was to it. Dream may have been the one to pull the trigger, but it was Sam that had handed him the bullet.

It was Sam who had thought leaving a child with the man who hurt him, _ abused him,  _ in the same small space for over a week was a good idea.

Stupid. 

He was meant to protect Tommy. More-so than he had ever been a Warden, more-so than he had ever been a builder or a creator. He was meant to  _ protect. _ He was meant to watch over the server and  _ help  _ others.

He wasn’t meant to allow men-turned-monsters to murder a child. He wasn’t meant to prioritise the prison over the life of a kid who just wanted closure – who just wanted to stand up for himself and then  _ leave. _

He shouldn’t have died. He shouldn’t have been left there. He shouldn’t have allowed Tommy in there in the first place. No matter how much he called Dream a monster for his actions, because Dream  _ was  _ a monster, it was Sam who was the catalyst.

It was Sam who was complacent in it all.

The blame laid on his shoulders, and his alone.

He wished that was enough to bring Tommy back.

There was gunpowder that ran through Sam’s veins, and it was something Sam was forced to be aware of no matter what he was doing. Even when he was younger, his parents made sure to drill into him that he was always to remain constantly vigilant and calm because if he wasn’t – well.

He had seen what charged creepers could do. He also knew that as a hybrid, whatever explosion he let off would be much,  _ much  _ worse.

He had been doing well for a long time now.

The last time he had lost control of himself he was much younger than he was now. It was a long time ago, when he was still able to look at a porcelain masked face and call that person a  _ friend. _

Dream had been the one to meet him in the aftermath of that explosion. Dream had been the one to calm his raiding, hissing thoughts. Dream had been the one to help him fix the landscape that had been utterly destroyed in Sam’s moment of weakness.

It was different now.

He was  _ older  _ now. More tired. His anger had started to simmer and die and it was watching the server grow and expand that he didn’t feel like he  _ needed  _ to constantly focus on remaining calm. It was watching teenagers laugh and make his friends laugh and —

Even then, that time had passed him by as well.

It was with the war that Sam decided to leave for a time. It was with the war that he made a decision to come back in order to  _ help.  _ To protect. To ward.

Warden Sam was born of that desire. He was born of the anger he had buried deep and made use of only for  _ good  _ and he  _ swore  _ no one would get hurt under him.

It worked well, obviously.

Creeper hybrid’s only cause destruction, he had been told a long, long time ago.

It was Dream who told him the opposite. It was Dream who showed him he could build and create instead of following the rules that people tried to make for him.

But Dream had always been a liar, even back then. He just hadn’t realised.

He always tried to see the good in people. It was what kept him alive for so long despite his hybrid nature.

He hadn’t realised that he had never seen the good in himself.

But that didn’t matter now.

Not now. Not ever.

It was lucky that Sam had years of practice, holding back the explosions and the rage. It was lucky, because when he saw Dream – hands covered in a child’s blood, laughter on his lips – he was sure the man would have fallen victim to his explosions.

And yet.

If he was a lesser man, if he didn’t see Tommy in the corner of the room, curled in on himself and not breathing, Sam probably would have done it. He was sure that, if he didn’t have a duty as what could have been a parent and as a decent person, he would have let the gunpowder in his veins burn and ignite. He wouldn’t have cared if the prison was destroyed along with Dream. He wouldn’t have cared if it crumbled down onto him.

But he wasn’t that kind of man. He kicked Dream into a corner with a thorns enchanted netherite boot, as far away as he could get him, and he picked up the body of a child – of Tommy, shattering a fire resistance potion onto both him and the teenager. And he left the cell and Dream’s echoing laughter behind him.

His body felt a lit fuse about to reach its end.

He refused to allow that.

He left the prison behind, and he wished he never had to go back. He wasn’t good enough to be allowed that. The dead teenager in his arms was enough proof of what he needed to do.

It should never be an easy thing to tell people that a teen – a  _ child – _ was dead, especially when the people you were telling were children themselves.

It shouldn’t have been easy. It  _ wasn’t. _

Watching Tubbo look at him, wide eyes empty and not even wet, almost accepting, almost unsurprised, was one of the hardest things that Sam ever had to do. Watching Ranboo rub at the burn scars beneath his eyes, horror growing within the teen with every word Sam spoke, left Sam’s throat dry.

He hated that these children almost seemed  _ used  _ to the death.

He hated it.

Telling people that Tommy was dead wasn’t easy, and Sam hated to admit it out loud but — he was a coward. Sam didn’t deserve to hide from what he had done but he let Jack spread the word as he headed back to a familiar, lonely hotel.

He couldn’t bring himself to deprogram Sam Nook. He couldn’t bring himself to tell the not-quite-robot that Tommy was dead. He couldn’t do anything more than program the bot to just — wait.

It was cruel.

Sam was cruel.

He wondered if Tommy hated him for his actions.

He hoped that, wherever the teen ended up, he despised Sam. It would be exactly what he deserved.

Sam made a decision the day Tommy died. He created a rule, just for himself, that he wasn’t allowed to break.

_ Stay away from everyone. _

It was better if they hated him. It was better if they stayed away from Sam and his gunpowder blood and his destruction tendencies and his participation in the death of a child.

It was better if they stayed away from him, where he would never,  _ ever  _ be able to hurt him.

Warden Sam, Protector. What a joke.

Delusional is what he was.

(Sam didn’t like using Ranboo’s memory loss against the boy, but it was better the ender-hybrid remembered what would only be the truth. Sam’s fault. It was better this way.)

Creeper hybrid’s only cause destruction. He should have known better to think anything else was true.

He was there for Tommy’s funeral, but the day after — the only glimpse people saw of Sam was when he stood guard at the front of the prison. He stayed there, guarding the only prisoner inside. He stayed there, letting the gunpowder in his veins grow and simmer and become all the more potent.

There would be a day when the prison and everyone inside it would be blown to smithereens at the hands of its own Warden. It was an easy decision.

**Author's Note:**

> i am so sorry. i just have feelings about sam and his talk with ranboo during ranboo’s stream today kind of broke me a little. so have this.
> 
> in the meantime, happy 69 ao3 fics to me? whoops.
> 
> tell me what you thought! comments sustain me :)


End file.
